When you sit down to write a song, what you’re really doing is transforming your own musical vision into something tangible—essentially a set of chords, melodies, rhythms, and sounds. Maybe that vision is really clear and you hear a melody in your head. Then getting it out can be as simple as humming out the notes. Or, maybe that vision is cloudy… you know you want to say something, you know there’s a feeling you want to get out, but you’re not sure how it should sound. That’s OK too, it might just take a little more time.

Whether the song comes quick or whether it takes some experimentation, one thing is pretty certain: in addition to meeting your vision, the notes and chords need to fit well together (at least if you want other people to enjoy your music too!). Now, good-sounding notes won’t make a song great on their own, but most of the time it’s a pretty fundamental part. Think about it like this: a song is a bridge from you to your listeners. If your song just connects with you and no one else, that’s like a bridge that only makes it halfway across a river… and that’s not much of a bridge. And if a song only connects with your listeners but you can’t stand it, then there’s not gonna be much joy there for you either.

So, a song generally needs to do two things. First, it has to connect from you to your listeners, like between two banks of a river. Second, like a bridge, it’s pretty important that it doesn’t fall down. That second part—the not-falling down bit—is what the skill of songwriting is all about. Now, to build some serious skills, we’d recommend using Waay (that’s why we built it after all) but while you build those skills, we want to give you something to help you write music right now. It’s a web-based tool called KeyFinder and it’s completely free.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say you’re sitting down with your instrument (guitar, piano, vocals, whatever) and you come up with one melody that you really like… but then you get stuck. What other notes could sound good with it? Well, just tell KeyFinder the notes you have and it’ll tell you the keys that fit! That’s all there is to it. It updates in real-time, so you can play around with adding and subtracting notes as much as you want. Check it out, use it, share it right here.

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